Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.

Nothing is as tedious as the limping days, When snowdrifts yearly cover all the ways, And ennui, sour fruit of incurious gloom, Assumes control of fate’s immortal loom

The will to work must dominate, for art is long and time is brief.

In the domain of painting and statuary, the present-day credo of the worldly wise, especially in France, is this: ... I believe that art is, and can only be, the exact reproduction of nature... An avenging God has heard the prayers of this multitude; Daguerre was his messiah.

Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.

There exist certain individuals who are, by nature, given purely to contemplation and are utterly unsuited to action, and who, nevertheless, under a mysterious and unknown impulse, sometimes act with a speed which they themselves would have thought beyond them.

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.